Lock and Key

by Sarah Dessen

  This was a massive understatement. For the last two years, I’d gone to Jackson High, the biggest high school in the county. Overcrowded, underfunded, and with half your classes in trailers, just surviving a year there was considered a badge of honor, especially if you were like me and did not exactly run with the most academic of crowds. After I’d moved around so much with my mom, Jackson was the first place I’d spent consecutive years in a long time, so even if it was a total shit-hole, it was still familiar. Unlike Perkins Day, the elite private school known for its lacrosse team, stellar SAT scores, and the fact that the student parking lot featured more luxury automobiles than a European car dealership. The only contact we ever had with Perkins Day kids was when they felt like slumming at parties. Even then, often their girls stayed in the car, engine running and radio on, cigarettes dangling out the window, too good to even come inside.

  Just as I thought this, Jamie suddenly pushed his chair back, jumping to his feet. “Roscoe!” he said. “Hold on! The dog door!”

  But it was too late. Roscoe, having at some point roused himself from his bed, was already lifting his leg against the dishwasher. I tried to get a better look at him but only caught a fleeting glimpse before Jamie bolted across the floor, grabbing him in midstream, and then carried him, still dripping, and chucked him out the small flap at the bottom of the French doors facing us. Then he looked at Cora and, seeing her stony expression, stepped outside himself, the door falling shut with a click behind him.

  Cora put a hand to her head, closing her eyes, and I wondered if I should say something. Before I could, though, she pushed back her chair and walked over to pick up the roll of paper towels, then disappeared behind the kitchen island, where I could hear her cleaning up what Roscoe had left behind.

  I knew I should probably offer to help. But sitting alone at the table, I was still bent out of shape about the idea of me at Perkins Day. Like all it would take was dropping me in a fancy house and a fancy school and somehow I’d just be fixed, the same way Cora had clearly fixed herself when she’d left me and my mom behind all those years ago. But we were not the same, not then and especially not now.

  I felt my stomach clench, and I reached up, pressing my fingers over the key around my neck. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of my watch, the overhead light glinting off the face, and felt myself relax. Five hours, fifteen minutes, I thought. Then I picked up my fork and finished my dinner.

  Six hours and fifty long minutes later, I was beginning to worry that my brother-in-law—the Nicest Guy in the World and Lover of Incontinent Creatures—was also an insomniac. Figuring they were the early-to-bed types, I’d gone up to my room to “go to sleep” at nine thirty. Sure enough, I heard Cora come up about forty minutes later, padding past my bedroom to her own, which was at the opposite end of the floor. Her light cut off at eleven, at which point I started counting down, waiting for Jamie to join her. He didn’t. In fact, if anything, there were more lights on downstairs now than there had been earlier, slanting across the backyard, even as the houses around us went dark, one by one.

  Now I’d been sitting there for almost four hours. I didn’t want to turn a light on, since I was supposed to be long asleep, so I’d spent the time lying on the bed, my hands clasped on my stomach, staring at the ceiling and wondering what the hell Jamie was doing. Truth be told, it wasn’t that different from the nights a few weeks back, when the power had been cut off temporarily at the yellow house. At least there, though, I could smoke a bowl or drink a few beers to keep things interesting. Here, there was nothing but the dark, the heat cutting off and on at what—after timing them—I’d decided were random intervals, and coming up with possible explanations for the weird, shimmering light that was visible at the far end of the backyard. I was just narrowing it down to either aliens or some sort of celestial neo-suburban phenomenon when suddenly, the windows downstairs went dark. Finally, Jamie was coming to bed.

  I sat up, brushing my hair back with my fingers, and listened. Unlike the yellow house, which was so small and thin-walled you could hear someone rolling over in a bed two rooms away, Cora’s palace was hard to monitor in terms of activity and movement. I walked over to my door, easing it open slightly. Distantly, I heard footsteps and a door opening and shutting. Perfect. He was in.

  Reaching down, I grabbed my bag, then slowly drew the door open, stepping out into the hallway and sticking close to the wall until I got to the stairs. Downstairs in the foyer I got my first lucky break in days: the alarm wasn’t set. Thank God.

  I reached for the knob, then eased the door open, sliding my hand with the bag through first. I was just about to step over the threshold when I heard the whistling.

  It was cheery, and a tune I recognized—some jingle from a commercial. Detergent, maybe. I looked around me, wondering what kind of company I would have on a subdivision street at one thirty in the morning. Soon enough, I got my answer.

  “Good boy, Roscoe! Good boy!”

  I froze. It was Jamie. Now I could see him, coming up the other side of the street with Roscoe, who had just lifted his leg on a mailbox, walking in front of him on a leash. Shit, I thought, wondering whether he was far enough away not to see if I bolted in the opposite direction, dodging the streetlights. After a quick calculation, I decided to go around the house instead.

  I could hear him whistling again as I vaulted off the front steps, then ran through the grass, dodging a sprinkler spigot and heading for the backyard. There, I headed for that light I’d been studying earlier, now hoping that it was aliens, or some kind of black hole, anything to get me away.

  Instead, I found a fence. I tossed my bag over and was wondering what my chances were of following, not to mention what I’d find there, when I heard a thwacking noise from behind me. When I turned around, I saw Roscoe emerging from his dog door.

  At first, he was just sniffing the patio, his nose low to the ground, going in circles. But then he suddenly stopped, his nose in the air. Uh-oh, I thought. I was already reaching up, grabbing the top of the fence and scrambling to try and pull myself over, when he started yapping and shot like a bullet right toward me.

  Say what you will about little dogs, but they can move. In mere seconds, he’d covered the huge yard between us and was at my feet, barking up at me as I dangled from the fence, my triceps and biceps already burning. “Shhh,” I hissed at him, but of course this only made him bark more. Behind us, in the house, a light came on, and I could see Jamie in the kitchen window, looking out.

  I tried to pull myself up farther, working to get more leverage. I managed to get one elbow over, hoisting myself up enough to see that the source of the light I’d been watching was not otherworldly at all, but a swimming pool. It was big and lit up and, I noticed, occupied, a figure cutting through the water doing laps.

  Meanwhile, Roscoe was still yapping, and my bag was already in this strange person’s yard, meaning I had little choice but to join it or risk being busted by Jamie. Straining, I pulled myself up so I was hanging over the fence, and tried to throw a leg to the other side. No luck.

  "Roscoe? ” I heard Jamie call out from the patio. “Whatcha got there, boy?”

  I turned my head, looking back at him, wondering if he could see me. I figured I had about five seconds, if Roscoe didn’t shut up, before he headed out to see what his dog had treed. Or fenced. Another fifteen while he crossed the yard, then maybe a full minute before he’d put it all together.

  “Hello? ”

  I was so busy doing all these calculations that I hadn’t noticed that the person who’d been swimming laps had, at some point, stopped. Not only that, but he was now at the edge of the pool, looking up at me. It was hard to make out his features, but whoever it was was clearly male and sounded awfully friendly, considering the circumstances.

  “Hi,” I muttered back.

  “Roscoe?” Jamie called out again, and this time, without even turning around, I could hear he was moving, coming closer. Unless I had a burst of superhum
an strength or a black hole opened up and swallowed me whole, I needed a Plan B, and fast.

  “Do you—?” the guy in the pool said, raising his voice to be heard over Roscoe, who was still barking.

  “No,” I told him as I relaxed my grip. His face disappeared as I slid down my side of the fence, landing on my feet with mere seconds to spare before Jamie ducked under the small row of trees at the edge of the yard and saw me.

  “Ruby?” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

  He looked so concerned that for a moment, I actually felt a pang of guilt. Like I’d let him down or something. Which was just ridiculous; we didn’t even know each other. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Is everything okay?” He looked up at the fence, then back at me, as Roscoe, who’d finally shut up, sniffed around his feet, making snorting noises.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was making it a point to speak slowly. Calmly. Tone was everything. “I was just . . .”

  Truth was, at that moment, I didn’t know what I was planning to say. I was just hoping for some plausible excuse to pop out of my mouth, which, considering my luck so far, was admittedly kind of a long shot. Still, I was going to go for it. But before I could even open my mouth, there was a thunk from the other side of the fence, and a face appeared above us. It was the guy from the pool, who, in this better light, I could now see was about my age. His hair was blond and wet, and there was a towel around his neck.

  “Jamie,” he said. “Hey. What’s up?”

  Jamie looked up at him. “Hey,” he replied. To me he said, “So . . . you met Nate?”

  I shot a glance at the guy. Oh, well, I thought. It’s better than what I had planned. “Yeah.” I nodded. “I was just—”

  “She came to tell me my music was too loud,” the guy— Nate?—told Jamie. Unlike me, he didn’t seem to be straining in the least, holding himself over the top of the fence. I wondered if he was standing on something. To me he added, “Sorry about that. I crank it up so I can hear it under the water.”

  “Right,” I said. “I just . . . I couldn’t sleep.”

  At my feet, Roscoe suddenly coughed, hacking up something. We all looked at him, and then Jamie said slowly, “Well . . . it’s late. We’ve got an early day tomorrow, so . . .”

  “Yeah. I should get to bed, too,” Nate said, reaching down to pull up one edge of his towel and wiping it across his face. He had to be on a deck chair or something, I thought. No one has that kind of upper-body strength. “Nice meeting you, Ruby.”

  “You, too,” I replied.

  He waved at Jamie, then dropped out of sight. Jamie looked at me for a moment, as if still trying to decipher what had happened. I tried not to flinch as he continued to study my face, only relaxing once he’d slid his hands in his pockets and started across the lawn, Roscoe tagging along at his heels.

  I’d just reached the line of trees, following him, when I heard a “Pssst!” from behind me. When I turned around, Nate had pushed open part of the fence and was passing my bag through. “Might need this,” he said.

  Like I was supposed to be grateful. Unbelievable, I thought as I walked over, picking up the bag.

  “So what’s it to?”

  I glanced up at him. He had his hand on the gate and had pulled on a dark-colored T-shirt, and his hair was starting to dry now, sticking up slightly. In the flickering light from the nearby pool I could finally make out his face enough to see that he was kind of cute, but in a rich-boy way, all jocky and smooth edges, not my type at all. “What?” I said.

  “The key.” He pointed to my neck. “What’s it to?”

  Jamie was going into the house now, leaving the door open for me behind him. I reached up, twining my fingers around the chain hanging there. “Nothing,” I told him.

  I shifted my bag behind me, keeping it in my shadow as I headed across the lawn to the back door. So close, I thought. A shorter fence, a fatter dog, and everything would be different. But wasn’t that always the way. It’s never something huge that changes everything, but instead the tiniest of details, irrevocably tweaking the balance of the universe while you’re busy focusing on the big picture.

  When I got to the house, there was no sign of Jamie or Roscoe. Still, I figured it wasn’t worth risking bringing my bag inside, and since the balcony was too high to toss it up, I decided to just stow it someplace and come back down for it in a couple of hours when the coast was clear. So I stuck it beside the grill, then slipped inside just as the shimmering lights from Nate’s pool cut off, leaving everything dark between his house and ours.

  I didn’t see Jamie again as I climbed the stairs to my room. If I had, I wasn’t sure what I would have said to him. Maybe he had fallen for my flimsy excuse, aided and abetted by a pool boy who happened to be in the right place at what, for me anyway, turned out to be the wrong time. It was possible he was just that gullible. Unlike my sister, who knew from disappearing and could spot a lie, even a good one, a mile off. She also probably would have happily provided the boost I needed up and over that fence, or at least pointed the way to the gate, if only to be rid of me once and for all.

  I waited a full hour to slip back downstairs. When I eased open my door, though, there was my bag, sitting right there at my feet. It seemed impossible I hadn’t heard Jamie leave it there, but he had. For some reason, seeing it made me feel the worst I had all day, ashamed in a way I couldn’t even explain as I reached down, pulling it inside with me.

  Chapter Two

  My mom hated to work. Far from a model employee, she had never had a job, at least in my recollection, that she actually enjoyed. Instead, in our house, work was a four-letter word, the official end of good times, something to be dreaded and bitched about and, whenever possible, avoided.

  Things might have been different if she was qualified for a glamorous occupation like travel agent or fashion designer. Instead, due to choices she’d made, as well as a few circumstances beyond her control, she’d always had low-level, minimum-wage, benefits-only-if-you’re-really-lucky kinds of jobs: waitress, retail, telemarketer, temp. Which was why, when she got hired on at Commercial Courier, it seemed like such a good thing. Sure, it wasn’t glamorous. But at least it was different.

  Commercial Courier called itself an “all-purpose delivery service,” but their primary business came from lost luggage. They had a small office at the airport where bags that had been routed to the wrong city or put onto the wrong plane would eventually end up, at which point one of their couriers would deliver them to their proper destination, whether it be a hotel or the bag owner’s home.

  Before Commercial, my mom had been working as a receptionist in an insurance office, a job she hated because it required the two things she hated above all else: getting up early and dealing with people. When her bosses let her go after six months, she’d spent a couple of weeks sleeping in and grumbling before finally hauling out the classifieds, where she spotted the ad for Commercial. DELIVERY DRIVERS NEEDED, it said. WORK INDEPENDENTLY, DAYS OR NIGHTS. She never would have called any job perfect, but just at a glance, it seemed pretty close. So she called and set up an interview. Two days later, she had a job.

  Or, we did. The truth was, my mom was not a very good navigator. I’d suspected she was slightly dyslexic, as she was always mixing up her right and left, something that definitely would have been a problem for a job that relied almost entirely on following written driving directions. Luckily, though, her shift didn’t start until five p.m., which meant that I could ride along with her, an arrangement that I’d assumed at first would only last for the initial few days, until she got the hang of things. Instead, we became coworkers, eight hours a day, five days a week, just her and me in her banged-up Subaru, reuniting people with their possessions.

  Our night always started at the airport. Once the bags were stacked and packed in the car, she’d hand over the sheet of addresses and directions, and we’d set off, hitting the nearby hotels first before venturing farther to neighborhoods and individual
homes.

  People had one of two reactions when we arrived with their lost luggage. Either they were really happy and grateful, or chose to literally blame the messenger, taking out their ire at the entire airline industry on us. The best tactic, we learned, was empathy. “Don’t I know it,” my mom would say, holding her clipboard for the person’s signature as they ranted on about having to buy new toiletries or clothes in a strange city. “It’s an outrage.” Usually, this was enough, since it was often more than the airlines had offered up, but occasionally someone would go above and beyond, being a total asshole, at which point my mom would just drop the bag at their feet, turn and walk back to the car, ignoring whatever they shouted after her. “It’s karma,” she’d say to me as we pulled away. “Watch. I bet we’re here again before we know it.”

  Hotels were better, because we only had to deal with the bellmen or front-desk staff. They’d offer us some kind of perk for fitting them in early on our route, and we became regulars at all the hotel bars, grabbing a quick burger between deliveries.

  By the end of the shift, the highways had usually cleared, and we were often the only car cresting silent hills in dark subdivisions. That late, people often didn’t want to be bothered by us ringing the bell, so they’d leave a note on their front door asking us to drop the bag on the porch, or tell us, when we called to confirm the delivery, to just pop the trunk of their car and leave it in there. These were always the weirdest trips for me, when it was midnight or even later, and we pulled up to a dark house, trying to be quiet. Like a robbery in reverse, creeping around to leave something rather than take it.

  Still, there was also was something reassuring about working for Commercial, almost hopeful. Like things that were lost could be found again. As we drove away, I always tried to imagine what it would be like to open your door to find something you had given up on. Maybe it had seen places you never had, been rerouted and passed through so many strange hands, but still somehow found its way back to you, all before the day even began.